


Time Starts Again

by Nicole Crucial (moilArchitect)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 13:07:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 11,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moilArchitect/pseuds/Nicole%20Crucial
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-SBURB AU. Dave dies. A familiar-looking psychopomp saves the day, and more than once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. OK, The First Time Is Excusable

**Author's Note:**

> This monstrous thing was commissioned by cooltimenocturne at tumblr. It took a total of three months to complete, but it was a blast to work on, even if these two aren't normally my specialty.
> 
> Please excuse my terrible unfunny chapter titles, I am just very fond of them.

 When you wake, suddenly, you are assaulted by three things: the first is de ja vu, the second is the alien silence of the internal clock that has ticked in your brain since the end of SBURB, and the third is the sight of garish amounts of blood.

 A blink or two, and the red resolves itself into shapes; clothes, a tunic, a hood, a tumble of black, a neon gear stamped upon the chest.

 Naturally, the first thing that tumbles out of your mouth is, "Why the fuck are you still wearing that thing."

 It's not the most pressing question to be asked here, you know. The two of you are floating—or not, you don't really know—in an endless, directionless expanse of inky blackness that's uniquely tangible; the blackness of death. You are dead, obviously; that is why your brain-ticking has stopped. This doesn't bother you as much as it probably should.

 The troll in front of you quirks her cherry lips into a smile half amused and half genuine. You are almost completely sure she painted them to match her pajamas, and you're not sure if that should be considered clever or try-hard. Her hair, long and dark and puffing softly with coiling waves, spills from the loose confines of her hood. A pair of large candy-corn horns curls from her head like a ram's.

 But her eyes are tawny yellow topaz—the eyes of a living troll, not a dead one.

 "There's nothing wrong with combining comfort and fashion," she tells you, her delicate red fairy-wings beating the air softly and scattering dust.

 You remember her well enough; here is the troll girl who guided you and Rose and what was left of the Alternian populace at the start of your journey on the meteor. Aradia or something. Behind your shades (because even in death, you are one fly motherfucker) you quirk a brow at her. You had just assumed, along with many of the trolls and kids, that Aradia had been denied entrance to Earth Respawned (as you like to call it) because she hadn't been on the meteor at their arrival.

 Apparently not. But then, she is Maid of Time, in more ways than one, and you know better than anyone that time shenanigans can accomplish most anything.

 You rub at a phantom pain in your ribs and start as your side opens up suddenly, smooth as butter, and blood gushes out. Now you remember; apparently, the stab wound did you in.

 Aradia seems to read your mind; she waves a hand (if you didn't know better you'd say she was scattering pixie dust) and the gash closes and you find yourself breathing again, without having realized you stopped in the first place.

 "Things work a little differently now," she explains jovially, crossing her legs Indian-style in midair and sitting placidly. "God tier revivals are only automatic when they're specified as a game construct."

 Shit.

 "So I kicked the bucket for real," you say flatly. “And not in the obscene and absolutely hilarious way.” If you had known that, you might have stopped to think about provoking a haughty, racist as fuck indigoblood. This is no way to go.

 "That is a pretty inappropriate and senseless metaphor, but yes," she says, "and no. Revivals aren't automatic, but that doesn't mean we don't have a stick shift."

 "And that's where you come in and do the grim reaper shit."

 "Exactly," she purrs. "After all, I'm more than qualified to be working with the dead and the resurrected."

 You're not exactly sure what she means by that, but if her role as a Time player was anywhere near as hellish an undertaking as yours was, you have a pretty good idea.

 "Your death could hardly be considered heroic or just," she adds.

 "What are you talking about? That was the most heroic death ever," you tell her, bravado and dripping, drawling sarcasm returned now that you're somewhat confident in your impending resurrection.

 "Some would say that," she agrees, surprising you. "Now, Dave, are you quite finished? Some of us have places to be."

 "You say that like my company isn't the better option."

 She just smiles at you, and leans in. Before you know what's happening, she pecks you lightly on the forehead. Time starts again, jerks into motion from the marrow of your bones outward, rewinding the ticking clock in your head. You are sputtering in an alley alone in the middle of the night thinking that she smells an awful lot like spring for someone who's a cousin to the grim reaper.


	2. Come On, Be More Careful

It is an embarrassingly short amount of time before you wake up in the inky black world again, tick-less silence ringing loudly in your ears, sprawled unflatteringly (and, for a few moments, very gorily) on your ass.

 Aradia is good-natured, but seems mildly irritated, as if you interrupted her in the middle of something. "This isn't a privilege to be abused, you know. Life has more value than you can ever imagine."

 She says it with her gold eyes sparking, her red lips forming the words as if she's warning herself, too. She is the only live psychopomp in the afterlife, and yet, she looks haunted already.

 But she doesn't volunteer her story.

 You say, "Maybe you're just better company than the dudes upstairs."

 Her lips drag into a smirk. Success.

 "Who says this is downstairs?" she wonders.

 “Says the satanic girl in red with horns and creepy yellow eyes,” you scoff. “If I didn’t know better I’d be pissing myself right now in fear of perdition.”

 She rolls her eyes. "You don't have to fall off a skyscraper every time you want to see me, you know," she says.

 And before you can inquire, there's another lipstick stain on your forehead, and time-ticking starts, and you're sitting in the parking lot of your apartment building, feeling like an idiot.


	3. Obviously The Third Time Is Not The Charm

The third time you die is more an accident than either of the other two, both of which were spurred on by at least some sense of recklessness and self-loathing. (You are rarely ever without either of these.) No; the third time that you wake up in the inky blackness, there’s a knife lodged in your forehead that only amplifies the terrible silence in your head, and you pry out with little gentleness. Bro’s booby traps are sort of geared towards maiming, true; but you know for a fact that there was a terrible malfunction with this one.

 Or maybe Bro just figured out that you now have at least some regeneration powers and decided to test it out. You don’t really begrudge him that if he did, to be honest.

 Aradia, on the other hand, does not look amused (though she’s not exactly vengeful, either). She cocks an eyebrow in a way that is almost familiar except it seems somehow more befuddled. How you can infer this from an eyebrow’s position on a troll girl’s forehead, you’re not exactly sure, but you are willing to bet that it is ironic on some subconscious level known not even to Bro. 

She doesn’t say anything, so you offer what you know to be an artfully incorrigible grin. “Third time’s the charm,” you say.

“You’re going to have to stop dying like an idiot,” she replies.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the only way I get to come back,” you point out. “This one wasn’t even my fault.”

“It was your third one this year,” she replies primly. _Has it been a year?_ you wonder. A full year of a blood-colored fairy flitting through your dreams, a tempting escape from a strangely tedious “normal” life, that you won’t admit you’re curious about? Yes. It’s been a year; it’s been a thousand years of Earth Respawned.

She’s talking again, though.

“Are you trying to get game over?” She seems genuinely curious. Aradia never seems to take death quite as seriously as you’d imagine a grim reaper would; she treats it more like an experiment than anything else.

“Not anymore.” The words come out of your mouth before you realize what you’re implying, and you are glad for your dead-shades so that she cannot see the look on your face as you internally berate yourself. _Smooth, Strider._

 Though she does not look piteous, like some might have, you interrupt her before she can ask.

 “Last time, you said I don’t have to off myself every time I want to hang out with my fairy godmother,” you say. The reference has been made in vain—or should you say _maid_ in vain—but you can’t ever really expect a troll to get a joke with the word “mother” in it.

 “If you mean me, then yes, I did.”

 “How?”

 “Oh, there are ways. There always have been.”

 “Dunno if you’ve heard, but dream bubbles are down. More out of order than Karkat’s mental state when confronted with Troll Adam Sandler romcoms.”

 “Yes.”

 “Then how?”

 “I believe that’s what you would call ‘classified information,’” she replies.

 You quirk an eyebrow just as she leans in for the now-familiar, sweet-scented peck, and as time starts yet again, you one hundred percent ironically promise yourself never to wash that particular eyebrow again.


	4. Davey, Get The Salt

If there's ever a girl likely to be well-read on summoning rituals for beings of the underworld, it's Rose. And if there's ever a girl likely to be able to teleport people from the plane of the afterlife to the plain of the during-life, it's Jade. It takes some convincing and a lot of pokerfacing at quirked eyebrows when you tell them your personal grim reaper wants to come to visit. You even have to employ your secret technique of rapping loudly until you get what you want (which is fucking genius, and John agrees).

 It probably helps that you only want to summon Aradia, not Cthulu, but you like to think that your sick beats brainwashed your friends-that-are-girls into doing your dirty work.

 It takes close to six months, during which you sometimes have to convince yourself that dying semifrequently probably isn't good for your health anyway. The internal Dave-clock keeps ticking, counting all the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months since you’ve seen her. (Since you’ve died.)

 But when Rose finds the right spell and Jade the right plane of existence, time and ticking stop, and Aradia drops haphazardly into a red circle inked on the Lalondes' pristine white carpet, wings beating frantically in surprise.

 Her hair is mussed, her eyes are wide, and she breaks into a grin after no more than a moment of bewilderment.

Time begins again when you blink, the moment of frozenness gone, dismissed as a side effect of summoning a goddess of ticking seconds.

You nail her in the face with some of Jade's old clothes, holes cut in the back of a graphic tee for her fairy wings, and tell her that god tier pajamas are so last session. She grins at you half-maniacally, making you briefly question the wisdom of bringing her into the world of the living.

Rose and Jade give each other a mysterious, exclusively female look, and then smile graciously at their guest.

“Nice to see you again,” she says, and you’re not sure who she’s speaking to.


	5. In Which Amusement Parks Are Compared To Funerals

It has been far too long since you and your ragtag gaggle of friends have had any wholesome old-fashioned fun—by which you obviously mean good-natured terrorism—and it is John who suggests the amusement park. Jade and Rose have never been ones to shy away from those kinds of thrills; not after SBURB.

Aradia has no idea what an “amusement park” is, though she mentions in passing that she assumes it must be something like a corpse party. (John stares, and Rose smiles, and you give her a stoic stare from behind the shades. No, Aradia, not everything entertaining has to be a corpse party.)

Regardless, she finds the idea of being flung through the air while precariously strapped to a metal cart just as intoxicating and adrenaline-inducing as the rest of you do. Even more, actually, which you thought she might.

You and John and the girls and the trolls pile into John’s dad’s new minivan at a godawful hour of the morning one weekend and barely survive the drive there, spattered as it is with intentional jerks of the wheel and spilled soda. Though it’s a big vehicle, it still doesn’t have enough seats, and you ponder the scent of decay in Aradia’s hair (in the afterlife, it smelled like spring) and the way her dusted wings threaten to choke you as she bounces unevenly on your lap every time John almost drags you all off the road.

She’s stolen something from Rose’s wardrobe today; there’s an octopus curling its tentacles around the curve of her hips and the shirt bunches at her waist, too-tight.

If it wasn’t so uncharacteristic of you, you would have smiled. Smooshed in haphazardly with your closest friends, your legs crammed against the back of the shotgun seat, Terezi practically licking your ear; Rose and Kanaya primly making out in the back as Karkat and Jade fight and John threatens to drive off a cliff if order is not restored. It is loud and ridiculous, heady and suddenly too much, and you feel as if you have a strikingly beautiful fairy corpse in your arms instead of a troll girl with bright, live, haunted eyes in a dead world.

These are the moments when you curse the game, curse your immortality, curse your aspect; the moments when everything piles up and becomes too much, and memories begin to flash as the ticking of time stops.

And then Aradia turns, inadvertently smothering you with her mass of long dark hair and beating you about the face with one deceptively delicate-looking wing, and gives you a look like she knows, and then ticking sounds loud and rhythmic again in your ears.

It’s only now that you realize that time never stops when she looks at you; it resumes.

No one else seems to notice that you’ve begun to breathe again. Aradia turns back to her conversation with Terezi about the many virtues of the color red.

Every single one of you rides every single ride, including the spinning teacups for irony alone, and you and Aradia call dibs on the front seat of every roller coaster. Without any sort of communication, you both put your leftover game-powers to use in halting the rides at the top of drops and speeding up the descents and making the amusement park about a thousand times more terrifying for everyone involved.

You don’t talk about the moment in the van. And you think you’re happy.


	6. Homeschooling Is The One Benefit Of Being A Troll

Conversely, you are far from happy when Aradia insists that you take her to school with the lot of you. In this strange hybrid world that SBURB shot out of its ass at the end of the game, school is still a thing that exists, which you think is sort of stupid. You think it’s especially stupid that school is still just _school_ , and that most of the troll population of Earth Respawned is homeschooled by lusii anyway, so you still get stuck mostly with boring humans.

But Aradia has been confined to Jade’s home with no one but a taxidermy grandpa and Bec for company for days now. And by confined, you definitely mean stirring up trouble, because a restless psychopomp is a dangerous thing.

Despite how much you complain, you kind of enjoy marveling at the kinds of catastrophes she manages to create (including but not limited to: excavations in the backyard, not entirely welcome scientific analyses of one First Guardian dog, and necromancy).

But she’s not a pet to be played with whenever you feel the need, as Jade reminds you. She’s a person with a life (sort of). Which you can definitely understand.

But… high school.

Aradia Megido, with her half-mad grins and beating fairy wings and the way she looks at the world like she’d like to see it burn out of curiosity alone, in _high school_.

You are not quite sure you’re ready for this.

(Actually, you’re one hundred percent sure you’re not ready for this.)

“People at school are a hell of a lot more boring than us,” you remind her coolly for the tenth time as John drives you to the institution in question. It’s just you and the other humans this morning, plus Terezi, who goes to school officially because of an absent lusus—but mostly because she enjoys befuddling the teachers with legal rhetoric and cackling maniacally in the lunchroom corner.

“You say that as if we’re _cool_ , coolkid,” Terezi purrs in answer.

“ _We_ aren’t. _I_ am. I am the baddest motherfucker to walk Earth Respawned, thank you very much.”

“You mean New Alternia,” corrects Aradia primly.

“I will call it New Alternia when Trollbama gets elected,” you shoot back.

She laughs, and you feel unduly gratified. You would linger to ponder what exactly that means, but John jerks into a parking spot and the six of you tumble out.

The teachers all give you nonplussed looks when you tell them that Aradia is your cousin from Japan. She tries to interrupt, but you immediately talk over her to explain that she is, regrettably, fluent only in Japanese.

It might have worked, too, if she hadn’t snorted in laughter.

“You ruined my ingenious plot,” you tell her on the way to the office.

“And you must have mistaken me for my dancestor.”

“But do you know how awesome it would’ve been to have a badass Japanese cousin, Aradia? _Do_ you?”

“I’m also gray, Dave.”

“Then one of us could’ve been adopted.”

The principal doesn’t dare put in a call to Bro after last time you were up here. Accordingly, you give him as many different and similarly outrageous tales as it takes for him to sigh and throw his hands up and give in, and write a note allowing Aradia to sit in on classes.

“Wouldn’t it have been easier to tell him the truth?” she asks, an eyebrow cocked in a way that is becoming almost as familiar as it is gratifyingly beloved.

“Not nearly as awesome, though. Plus, I doubt he would’ve believed the grim reaper story, either.”

“I prefer the term ‘specialist psychopomp.’”

“I prefer ‘hot Japanese cousin,’” you tell her before you realize what has tumbled out of your mouth.

“Hot?”

John rescues you from what could’ve been a supremely terrible situation by skidding up to the two of you after third period with an impressive armful of water balloons.

By the end of the day, the six of you are sitting, smug and unapologetic, in the principal’s office with half the school soaking wet.

A drop of water hits the floor; the ticking of time stops, everything seems to freeze. _What’s wrong with me_ , you wonder, mildly dazed.

Aradia, dripping-grinning-gorgeous (wait, what?), turns to you and runs fingers through your damp hair and says, “And you told me that school was boring.”

With the rhythm of your breath, the ticking resumes.

Nothing is ever boring with Aradia Megido around.


	7. Bro Is Secretly Kamina

Aradia manages to integrate herself into school with the rest as you nearly as easily as she integrated herself into your lives. You know for a fact that this is not something related to her time shenanigans, so you assume it’s just something she’s born with, an inherent ability to watch, morbidly interested, from the sidelines, fully a part of whatever is going on without anyone quite being aware of it.

Except you, because you are very, very aware how quickly she finds herself a spot in Earth Respawned, as if there was already a hole here waiting to be filled and she just happened to be the right shape.

You wonder, briefly and dangerously, if the hole is actually in the world or if it’s just in you.

Whatever it is, the monologue of ticking in your head keeps its steady beat at the back of your brain, and it doesn’t stop. Not for a while. Not when a girl made of time (you secretly love the puns) taps you on the head spasmodically and affectionately and perfectly in time to your soul, as if she’s kickstarting the ticking around which your world spins.

Perhaps she is. Aradia has been a god tier far longer than you; and she’s probably known these things for far longer. All of the women in your life have an inherent, immovable core of self-awareness that surpasses even irony.

You don’t know if it’s her powers at work or just her presence, but the day goes faster with her tailing you here and there; some call her a lost puppy, following you wherever you go. But you know better; you know that _she’s_ the creature sent to supervise _you_ , not the other way around.

Most of the trouble in your life these days starts with one of your friends bounding (or gliding, or creeping, or stomping, depending on the person) up to you with a mischievous, mysterious, or mad as hell look on their face.

Today is no exception, as Jade scampers up, her canine ears twitching. You pause a moment to thank the game that she didn’t get a tail, too.

“Dave! Aradia! There’s an anime club meeting today after school. You _have_ to come.”

You keep a pokerface under the shades as Aradia tilts her head.

“Sorry,” you tell her as apologetically as you can. “No can do, Fido.”

Jade pouts. This makes her look about ten times more doglike, but in a horrifying, meltingly adorable way. “Dave, come _on_.”

“Not after what happened last time,” you tell her.

It’s not like you have anything against the animes. You just don’t like watching them surrounded by a room full of giggling, greasy-haired freshmen who dream of body pillows and little else.

You feel Aradia giving you a curious look.

At this point, John goes by, giving an apologetic _sorry, you’re on your own_ look.

You are possessed with the sudden desire to screw him over. “Why don’t you ask Egbert?”

“He’s got his Pranksters Anonymous thing going on.”

“Stay off the freshie-wing bathroom,” calls the dork in question from several yards behind you.

“ _I’ll_ go, Jade,” Aradia pipes in then.

You look down in surprise. You don’t know why you’re still surprised when she decides to do things independently of you, with little regard for how you feel about it.

“You will? _Awesome_. You’ll love it. We have human _and_ troll animes, it’ll be great.”

And, surprisingly, it is. Until the one moment that inevitably ruins everything.

Jade’s cozy with the entire science department, so she manages to get them teacher’s lounge privileges in which to watch anime after school. The room darkens and you watch a couple of episodes of random series and Aradia is next to you and your arm is kind of stretched out along the back of the sofa behind her—not _around_ her, really, but comfortably—

 _Fuck_. That is definitely the title screen for _Gurren Lagann_ sitting up there staring you in the face as impudently as a smuppet’s plush rump.

Aradia seems to notice your discomfort. “What is it, Dave? Is this a particularly traumatic one?”

You shake your head mutely. Actually, you fucking love _Gurren Lagann_. It’s just that you know what is inevitably about to happen, considering several of your friends are in the room.

“You’ll see,” you reply, resigned to your fate, comforted only slightly by the fact that the short girl with big, lively yellow eyes sitting beside you doesn’t seem to mind your arm behind her.

Soon enough, Kamina appears onscreen and there is a collective hoot-jeer. Aradia looks up at you questioningly, but Jade points out the obvious.

“Now, who does _that_ remind you of?”

“Shut the hell up,” you say half-heartedly. “I get it. Bro’s got some anime shades. His level of ironic mimicry far surpasses that of all the rest of you, and you are so jealous your faces are about to collectively melt off.”

“I wonder if this Kamina figure has a similar fondness for smuppets?” asks Rose with that insufferable smirk.

“Only if he has fucking fabulous taste.”

“They’re talking about your brother?” asked Aradia, an eyebrow quirked.

“Yeah,” you reply. “Because he happens to wear a similar pair of shades and watch some anime.” You tap your aviators with familiarity. “Badass runs in the family.”

“And he likes puppets?”

“Smuppets,” corrects Rose. “Much plusher rumps and more phallic facial protrusions. The distinction is important.”

“He sounds interesting,” Aradia says. She doesn’t say it in the hesitant way that most people do when they hear these things--the kind of “oh, that’s nice, ha ha ha” expression that means they don’t really want to hear any more. Aradia seems legitimately fascinated by his weird older brother ecto-dad.

And the intently curious expression on her face is, as always, mildly disturbing and legitimately dangerous.

“ _Very_ interesting,” replies Rose.

“Keeps the whole apartment full of smuppets and terrible 90s scifi anime,” nods Jade sagely.

“I’d really like to meet him,” Aradia continues. “And I’ve never been to your hive before, anyway.”

You resist the urge to explain to her that Bro is one of the reasons she hasn’t been over to the apartment. Before you can say so, the ticking in your brain comes to an abrupt stop; _Gurren Lagann_ on the TV freezes. Time stands still.

And Aradia gives you a wide smile filled with pearly white teeth, and in a moment everything clicks back into place.

You can’t really bring yourself to say no after that. 


	8. This One's A Keeper

Your apartment is on the top floor, for easier access to the roof when the clock hits strife. You lean against the wall in the small elevator, and Aradia grins, jumping and beating fairy dust off her wings when it lurches into motion.

She smiles back at you. “I love doing that.”

Somehow, this doesn’t surprise you. You’ve found over the past few weeks that this crimson troll girl has a taste for the little details in life that very few others you’ve ever met have been able to fully appreciate. The dust motes in sunbeams, the tiny divets in elaborate icing on cake, the dewdrops on leaves of flower petals. (The tick-tick-ticking of time in the back of your mind.) Her uncanny ability to savor these things leaves a terrible taste in your mouth that speaks—like the scent in her hair—of decay, of a life not nearly long enough, but of course you’ll say nothing.

Dave Strider initiating feelings jams is not really a thing that happens.

She jumps again once the elevator slows to a stop, and this time, she pulls you with her.

Your apartment is at the end of the hall, and it alone shows outward signs of disrepair. The doorframe is beaten and cracked and a repairman has been working on it more than once—Bro has always gotten kicks out of flinging you into the door during strifes, mostly because of the resulting clamor and destruction. Aradia doesn’t seem to mind.

You had to tell Bro she was coming, just so that he wouldn’t set any lethal booby traps. (The irony in trying to save a psychopomp from an untimely death does not escape you—nor does the unease that the thought brings.) When you open the door, nothing happens; the foyer is littered with smuppets and broken weaponry, but nothing comes hurtling at you out of nowhere. you let out a silent breath you didn’t realize you’d been holding.

Except this only means that he’s going to make a valiant attempt to destroy your reputation in the most horrifying way possible.

May as well get it over with. “Bro?” you call, trying not to look at Aradia as she picks up a smuppet and examines it with a smirk and a spark of legitimate interest.

He pops his head around the kitchen corner, baseball cap and shades and all. You glance sideways at Aradia, who only shows that broad, mildly unnerving smile and promptly introduces herself, telling Bro that she likes his shades. She’s been watching more TTGL, it seems.

Kamina is her favorite, of course.

You can almost see the brownie points racking up at a rapid pace.

Bro tells Aradia that he has the entire anime on boxed DVDs in the living room.

She lights up, at that. You feel a sharp stab of something— _resentment?—_ as she does, berating yourself for not thinking of it first.

Bro kicks broken swords out of the way and leads a procession to the living room, where he promptly loads TTGL into the DVD player and carefully relocates the pile of smuppets on the couch to a different place.

“Do they have names?” Aradia asks.

You and Bro share a look—and then both burst into laughter.

In a moment, Aradia joins.

You sit the way you did in the anime club; Aradia next to you leaning back into the cushions, your arm draped lazily over the back of the couch. Not around her or anything, just nearby. Of course.

But when you do that, Bro seems to think something’s changed, and disappears into his room (presumably to craft more abominable butt puppets).

Though you’re incredulous of his behavior, you don’t think he’s gonna come bother you again, so it’s a lot easier to sit back and enjoy the anime. Though you don’t tell Aradia, TTGL is one of your favorites. And Kamina is your favorite character, too.

Instead you make fun of the dubbing, and she laughs and shushes you, and by the end of the day you’re pretty sure that neither of you actually absorbed any of the show. Aradia, because you’ve been distracting her. You, because you’ve been distracted by Aradia.

Bro reappears to say goodbye, suspiciously like a well-trained, puppet-obsessed dog. She’s halfway down the hall and you’re about to close the door when he leans down from behind you and asks—

“That your girlfriend, little man?”

Time, ticking along merrily at the back of your mind, stands still. Bro freezes. The door remains ajar, and you are suspended in this moment.

The elevator pings, and you think you hear a flutter of fairy-dust wings and a snicker, and it begins again.

You slam the door shut too fast.

“Nah,” you say.

“She should be. I like her.”

 _Of course you do_ , you think. _She’s irresistibly weird and high on every little detail, even in this shitty old apartment._

But you just grunt and go to shut yourself up in your room, the decay scent of her hair still permeating your sleeves.

 


	9. My Milkshake Brings All The Trolls To The Yard

It gets cold outside. The breath chafes your lungs and throat as it moves in and out of you in rhythm with the beats of ticking time in your head. Everything you do now is to that particular cadence. You’ve been described more than once as someone who moves to the beat of his own drum, but no one has ever known how literally their expressions applied to your life.

Not until Aradia, anyway, who walks in time with you like you’re band kids locked in habit, who taps her fingers to the beat and jerks you back to the life when it suddenly stops.

You have a bit of a thing with ice cream on cold days, and it’s been a while since you and she hung out alone, without having to endure the wandering and suggestive eyes of _someone_ , be it a human or a troll or Bro or the empty stares of velvety butt puppets.

So you convince her to walk to the ice cream parlor with you, even if the cold knifes through your air passages the whole way there. Aradia doesn’t seem bothered, and you wonder if a troll’s blood color has anything to do with their body heat. After all, Aradia is always warm.

“Mint chocolate chip shake,” you tell the pimply cashier who’s only a little older than you and who gawks shamelessly at your pretty “Japanese cousin.”

Aradia looks over the assortment of flavors, poking her bottom lip out the way she always does when she’s considering things like that. You notice it, and you notice the ginger cashier noticing too, and you give him a withering glare from behind your shades.

To protect your Japanese cousin from skeevy-looking losers, you tell yourself.

“Red velvet bowl,” says Aradia finally.

You pick seats at the counter as far away from the boy as possible.

“I’m glad you invited me,” beams Aradia, her fingers tapping distractingly on the marble counter in perfect time with the cadence in your head. “It’s been a while since we’ve gotten to spend time together.”

You shrug. “Couldn’t let my main psychopomp, emphasis on the psycho, begin to forget how motherfucking fabulous her timebro is.”

She grins in the way you know means she’s suppressing an eye-roll.

“How’s Bro?” she asks.

You shrug again. “Fine. Been up all night filming his new puppet porno. Something to do with Nurse Buttfuck and her plush-rumped double amputee patient.”

At this, she chuckles, because she actually thinks that you’re joking.

“You know,” she begins, scooping the bits of cake out of her ice cream, “last time I was over, I definitely thought I heard him ask you if I was your girlfriend. Which, given he’s a human, I assume to mean that he was asking whether we were waxing red.”

Aradia seems not at all flustered discussing this, and you wish longingly for shades that cover your whole face. You start gulping your milkshake instead, to occupy your mouth.

“I didn’t hear what you said, though.”

She drags the last syllable up, cruelly, like a question.

It is at this precise moment that you choke on your milkshake.

Even if half the parlor panics (save for Aradia, who watches with an almost predatory sort of amused curiosity) and you cough mint-green all over your favorite shirt, you are glad. Because she doesn’t ask any more questions about what you said to Bro about ‘waxing red.’

But it’s not like you’re totally oblivious to the signs. You just thought that Aradia was planning to be here short-term and didn’t want to get involved, or maybe that she preferred yellow-blooded psychics to red-blooded time boys.

 

And you have to admit, as she ends up cackling maniacally at your near death in that horrifying way you adore, she’s a pretty fantastic catch.

 


	10. Nasal Orifice Blood Leakage

No matter how hard you try, there is a troll girl in red who refuses to see herself out of your head.

You see her every day. She haunts your mind at night. The way she grins with wholehearted abandon that simultaneously makes your skin crawl wondering exactly what’s going on in her pretty little brain and your neck burn with a completely involuntary heated blush. The way she seems to stare straight through your shades, whether she actually can or not. The way she runs her fingers through your hair without even thinking about it, pretending like she has no idea what it does to you. The way her hair bounces around the flare of her hips, the way her nails scrape gently every time she touches you, the way she sprawls daintily on the couch next to you just barely within the reach of your arm flung across the back, the way she purposefully beats fairy dust off of her wings into your eyes whenever she knows you’re staring at the clasp of her bra through the holes in her shirt.

The way she looks at you like only a Hero of Time can understand, with eyes more alive and simultaneously more haunted than you have ever seen.

You’ve seen and liked a lot of girls in your time. But Aradia Megido is the first one for whom time not only stops, but starts itself anew, your own personal timeline reborn in her intense gaze.

It’s time to acknowledge that you are hopelessly and irrevocably sick for this girl, and not in the good way.

You could write a hundred thousand raps about every aspect of her and she could hate them all and it wouldn’t be enough.

You imagine what it would be like to kiss her and end up daydreaming for long minutes.

You become obsessed with the scents of spring and decay, the things that only Aradia can replicate so perfectly.

These thoughts are vaguely terrifying, which is strange, considering all that you’ve faced in your lifetime.

But they are.

Your friends have noticed your growing interest, and tease you constantly. You are positive that Aradia has noticed as well, for all she likes playing dumb (probably to torment you). This only serves to make you want to crawl into a hole and never look at a girl again. Feelings suck when you have such a huge net of concerned friends who are always prying into your business. Somehow, they’re all much more interested in who’s getting in your pants than you are.

She comes over again soon enough for more TTGL, because watching it on the TV with popcorn surrounded by smuppets is infinitely preferable to watching it at anime club or at Rose’s house on a computer with a pirated copy.

You’re in your usual spot to her left, your arm propped on the back of the couch, Aradia circumstantially close to it in the way that’s always been exclusive and casually special to the two of you. She swallows some popcorn and frowns, and the look on her face is familiar: she’s about to say something unpredictable.

“I don’t know if I could do it,” she says.

You know it’s bait, but you take it anyway, eyeing her through the shades. “Care to elaborate, Yoko?”

This is what you have started calling her ironically because of the Japanese cousin thing and because of the bikini-clad redhead in the anime you’re watching right now. Honestly, it probably bothers you more than it does her, but you are a masochist.

“That’s exactly it,” she giggles. “Yoko! I don’t know if I could run around kicking all that ass in a bikini top.” She yanks at the straps of her tank top, immediately drawing your eye to all that smooth gray skin on her chest, the swell of her own breasts.

Shit.

“You’d be _everywhere_ ,” she says with conviction and the kind of grin that tells you she knows exactly what she’s doing.

“Everywhere,” you echo somewhat faintly. You can feel it happening again; can feel the faint clicking of your internal clock slow and stop. Can feel her more than see her looking up at you with that terrible grin, and somehow, despite the freeze, you feel yourself leaning closer—you’re so _close_ , you can smell her lip gloss, almost _taste_ it—

“Dave!” she shrieks suddenly. The spell is broken. You jerk back and hear whirring in your head and the ticking resumes, assuming the cadence of mocking laughter.

You blink, confused, and then realize that blood is gushing from your nasal orifices.

If you ever had any designs on this girl, they are promptly dissolved in a wash of blood and shame.


	11. Flaming Hot Japanese Relatives

In school the next morning you overhear her whispering frustratedly to Rose and Jade before you turn a sudden corner. You don’t know why, but you freeze there, listening.

“I’ve waited long enough,” huffs Aradia, so that you can hear the roll of her tawny yellow eyes.

“Aradia! He needs to do this _himself_ ,” Jade scolds.

“Agreed,” states Rose in her prim, low voice. “Let him acquire the testes to proceed, Megido. Make a man out of him.”

“I don’t want a man,” she snaps back irritably. “I want _him_.”

You don’t know if it’s actually possible for your heart to drop into your shoes. You are immediately consumed with an irrepressible fury and need to know who this boy is that is captivating Aradia, this filthy creature distracting her attention and—even worse— _fucking_ with her.

You step out from around the corner, looming tall, radiating excitement. The three girls turn in surprise as soon as they see you, and the two humans look taken aback by the look on your face.

Aradia just beams and says, “Oh, good.”

Heedless of your righteous anger, she sidles up, grabs you by the collar of your shirt, and yanks you down to give you a taste of her cherry lip gloss.

Time-ticking stops, and for once you are glad it does.

 _Holy shit,_ is all your mind can think. You don’t even complete a full realization that she was talking about _you_ ; you are lost in the heat of her soft lips, the feel of her wide hips under your hands, the smell of her trademark spring-and-decay scent. Your shades dig uncomfortably into the bridge of your nose but you don’t _care_ , because you are kissing Aradia—no, _she’s_ kissing _you_ —and it is a thousand times more amazing than you ever could have imagined.

Less than ten seconds in, somebody remembers that the two of you are in the middle of a school hallway and rips the two of you apart.

You nearly decapitate the offender as time clicks itself back into place, but Aradia stops you with a wicked grin.

The principal looks at you both, nonplussed. “Mr. Strider,” he says, “I didn’t know you were _kissing_ cousins.”

You eye Aradia from under your shades, fully aware that you are red as a strawberry. Red as her lips.

“Well, sir,” you tell him, “you’ve obviously never had a flaming hot Japanese relative of any kind.”


	12. You Thought That Last Chapter Was Going To Be The End, Didn't You

The honeymoon phase never lasts very long.

You are kissing her— _she_ is kissing _you_ — around the corner of an alley by the ice cream shop where you once choked on a milkshake, your fingers in her long hair, the taste of her in your mouth, when the end finds you.

You really should’ve seen it coming. After all, happiness doesn’t last long for Striders in general, and you especially. And you have been so, so, _so_ happy with this crazy girl and her crazy smile—you really should’ve known that it couldn’t have lasted.  

More than that, you should’ve seen coming the lowblood thug creeping into the little dark space, sharp metal glinting in his hands, his ragged fingernails closing decisively around the collar of Aradia’s shirt.

You are stunned when he grabs her, but she doesn’t scream—just starts. Instinctively you drop your shades back down over your eyes, and air refuses to enter your lungs.

“That’s right,” hisses the troll with wildly curlicue horns, his faced dark and scarred, backing up several steps, freezing as you follow them. “Don’t move, or your little mutant fairy here gets it.”

You can’t breathe. Of course _you_ know better than to think Aradia’s pixie-dust wings are a mutation; they’re there because she went god tier. But the peoples here know nothing of SBURB and SGRUB, and Aradia has always gotten strange, condescending looks for her blood color and her wings both.

Right now it’s more than just a mean look.

“Don’t do this, man,” you say. You were hoping that your voice would reflect a calm you don’t actually feel, but you hoped in vain; it cracks neatly like an egg, giving everything away. You are no pokerfaced Strider. You are just a teenage boy in love, and this man has his hands on your everything.

Hot blood courses through your vains. Adrenaline pumps. Strifing with Bro is one thing, but the thrill of an actual fight is much different. You haven’t felt anything like this since SBURB. Since you had something to fight tooth and nail _for_.

You are going to rip this motherfucker limb from limb.

The troll is nervous, fidgety, quick. You can’t draw a sword, you know, because if you do he’ll draw his knife across Aradia’s neck. She’s looking at you, eyes alive and dancing, and you can’t tell what she’s trying to say except that it’s _no_. She’s not screaming but she looks terrified... but not for _herself_...

If you can just—slow things _down_ —

And for once, the clicking in your head obeys. Time stops and a sword appears in your hands, and once again you are a god, and here is a mortal you are about to decimate.

You drive forward before the thug can move a muscle and shove Aradia aside to bury a sword in his chest.

Now, she screams.

You have no idea why; her captor is dead. They’re okay.

You turn around.

“Ara—”

Time stops. Everything goes black.


	13. Obligatory Character Death Perspective Switch

**ARADIA**

A hundred thousand curses bubble up in your mind and you are suddenly overcome with a latent urge to destroy everything in a ten-mile radius.

The first thing you destroy is the second criminal. The one who was behind Dave the whole time with a gun.

You don’t remember how you do it. You are too consumed in a destructive rage to care, but in the end both the troll bodies are a bloodied mess on the concrete and there are piles of broken bricks littering the alley and people are staring at you, red splashed with red, tears on your face and hickeys on your neck.

A wave of exhaustion hits you and you smack onto your knees, hard, by Dave’s body, lay his ruined head with its shattered shades in your lap.

 _“Why did you have to be the hero!”_ You screech at him. _“You know you can’t do that, you stupid piece of shit!”_

But dead Daves don’t answer, and this is no exception.

 


	14. This Would Be A Good Time To Contact An Adult

There is no one at Jade’s house to ask questions or call authorities, so you take your dead Dave there.

She gasps and nearly bursts into tears when she opens the door, but you snap at her to hush and let you in and call Rose.

She breaks down after she does that.

Rose arrives curious, her black lipstick impeccable, ready to make a sarcastic observation about any possible situation.

She freezes, stricken, when she sees, and you have to bark at her before _she_ breaks down, too.

“It was heroic,” you tell them miserably.

“Oh, god,” moans Jade, burying her face in her hands, her fluffy white ears flattened with devastation.

“What—”

“Does it matter?” you say harshly. “ _Heroic_.”

You think, _He died for me. The idiot died for me. They could’ve killed me and I would’ve been fine—maybe—because that’s not a heroic way to die, throat slit by a street thug. But trying to save me—that idiot!_

Why, why, _why_ had she fallen for an idiot?

Aradia drew a shaky breath. She had to work quickly, here.

“Rose, Jade, you need to send me back.”

“To the dream bubbles? Why?”

“So I can get back to doing my _real_ job and intervene.”

“But it was _heroic_ ,” says Rose, puffy-eyed, her ectobrother’s ruined head cradled in her arms, heedless of the blood soaking her front. “You can’t _possibly_ do anything.”

You know so much more of death than these naive girls, and it’s almost painful. You could tell them things that would break them, if you wanted to, but you don’t have time to explain.

So you just say, “I can try.”

And they want to try so badly.

You do, too.


	15. Banished To The Underworld... Again

Jade begs one last time as you sit in the center of the pitch-dark circle.

 “Aradia, please, we can’t lose you too.”

 “No,” you say. “It’s time I go back to doing what I’m meant to.”

 Rose has a book in her fingers, her face smeared with makeup. “You realize that the spell we used is a one-time summoning, right?”

 “Of course.”

 “We never told Dave.”

 “I know. Neither did I.”

 You were foolish enough to think that you could get away with leaving the purgatorial in-betweens where you’ve dwelt for years now, and now you are paying the price.

 “Aradia...”

 Rose’s fingers move over the text, her face dark. She looks at you with too much understanding; she knows your plans.

 “You know you can’t bargain. Games like this are not played fairly.”

 Jade stares at Rose, confused, but you shake her head.

 “I’d rather try and lose than not try at all.”

 She rubs wearily at her badly smeared makeup. “He always said you had a death wish,” she tells you. “And now I see what he meant.”

 “Not a wish,” you say inaudibly as she begins an incantation and a teary Jade glows green with effort. “Just a familiarity.”


	16. Girl Meets Tentaclemonsters

The horrorterrors are horrible and terrible indeed; you have only ever dared to stay on the very fringe of their domain, despite your usual lust for the archaic and dangerous. There are some things in this world not meant for the eyes of humans or trolls or anyone but their own kind, and the Circle is one of these things.

 That is not to say that you haven’t done your research, dug up your mythology, and maintained your morbid sense of curiosity towards all things old and dying. You and Rose have had multiple extensive conversations about it, but you always seem to ask more questions than even she cares to answer.

 You never heard them on Derse, because your dream self was always asleep in the crypt. A special case, as a narrator of your long and convoluted story once said. You have always been a special case, haven’t you?

 As morbid as your culture was, you always knew that your closeness with ghosts and obsession with archaic items wasn’t exactly typical. But you enjoyed your strange little existence and the caves and holes, the hieroglyphics along the walls that you could never quite puzzle out (you are sure now that they were precursors to the game), the rocky footing that sometimes threw you head-over-heels down an unknown cavern and set your rusted blood to racing. You loved those scrapes you always managed to get caught up in, between the stampeding hoofbeasts and swarming wingrats and angry hermits. You loved the yellowblooded boy who dragged himself out of his cozy hive to spend time in the great outdoors with you because he liked you that much. You loved your FLARP—for a while, at least.

 And then things all went hazy after a strange incident with your yellowblooded boy and a blueblooded egomaniac and you became one of the spirits you had so long heard in your head.

 You should have died for real, by all rights. But the game had decided that you were a player, and it could not afford to let you perish yet; and your yellowblooded boy did not think to kiss you that night, or else you might have woken deep in the Dersian crypts, surrounded by the voices of the Circle in addition to those of the dead.

 But no. You became a ghost yourself. And then the game started and everything changed. Or, really, everything developed according to what Skaia had decided, and it just seemed strange to the rest of your friends.

 You were only ever able to fully appreciate life once you gained god tier—once you got it back. Not during the strange half-life of ghosthood or your original allotted lifetime. You suppose it comes from your own personal, intimate contact with this thing that stops your body moving and shuts down your organs and puts your brain to sleep.

 But tentaclebeast whispers must be something like the whispers of the dead. After all, they exist outside of time and space, and somewhere deep within that midst the long-destroyed Lord English’s vestiges still slaughter them mercilessly.

 Your wings bat the air hesitantly as you inch forward in a trail of fairy dust, towards the outer ring of the dark gods. You have never known _death_ ; you have known dead and you have known _the_ dead, but never the actual physical manifestation of death itself. The Noble Circle is not death itself, but it is very closely related, and it is the only entity with the power to revert this.

 The only problem is that it has no reason to.

 You are close now, and no matter how little you have communicated with the horrorterrors before, you can't fail to hear their terrible voices now. You nearly gasp aloud. The dead are one thing to hear in your head. _This_ is another entirely.

 They whisper, a thousand at once and one a thousand times, in no language translatable to anything. But you are a creature of Derse, and you know what they say to you.

 They whisper your name, and they reach out dark tendrils to wrap around you.

 “No,” you tell them. As gently as you can, while speaking to masses of creatures who would like nothing more than to pull you into the abyss.

 And they hesitate, just briefly, because you are a child of Derse and because you know of some of the dark things that hide within.

 “I need you to do something for me.”

 Your words send them into a rustling fervor, and you must wait eons for them to quiet, to be able to understand what they say.

 No; not what they say; they do not speak. What they _convey_ , regardless of mechanism or lack thereof.

  _And what would that be?_ ghosts through your head, not necessarily a thought but an idea that plants itself there, reeking of perturbment.

 “I need you to bring back a boy.”

 Again, the whisper-rustling, the silent echoing croaks that make no sound.

_A boy._

 “A boy I happen to be fond of,” you say, swallowing hard, knowing that lying is useless. “A boy who shouldn’t have died.”

  _There is no ‘shouldn’t have,’ there is only ‘did,’ and 'does,' and 'will do.'_

 “No, but he earned the shouldn’t have; the shouldn’t have is his prize. He’s one of _yours_ —”

 That is the wrong thing to say.

_A boy! A boy who belongs to us!_

 You have to stop yourself from hissing violently. “ _No_. You are his patron, the patron of his dreamer’s moon, like you are mine. He’s not your property.”

_And yet, you think he is yours?_

 A shiver starts in the base of your spine; moves outward, vibrates your wingtips and toes and the ends of your hair. You remember the last time you called a boy yours, and how that ended up. 

“No. He’s his own. But... he’s important to me.”

  _What makes you think we have the power to accomplish what you want? We are not gods of death, psychopomp._

 You point a finger out towards the purple-black abyss that few, if any, words can ever describe.

 “No. But you are the most powerful active entities left in this plane of existence, and you are where the dreamers rest when their dream selves die, aren’t you? You know more than enough of death, at least of the deaths of dreamers.” 

_If we could return this... boy to you. Why should we? You have done little and less for us._

 You take a deep breath. You have known from the start that this is where it will get tricky.

 “One,” you start, “because you’re wrong; I helped destroy Lord English.”

_And nearly existence itself, and us as well._

 “We _both_ helped destroy him,” you snap. “And you owe us for that, because we accomplished for you what you could not do for yourselves. You of all creatures should know of blood debts.” 

_You have implied there is more than one reason._

 “Two,” you continue, “because you have more than enough souls in your grasp.”

_We should be the judge of that. And?_

 You can feel your blood, _red red red,_ red like strawberries and lipstick and pajamas and his eyes and his blood too, you can feel it pumping through your veins. You can feel every nerve ending crackle with electricity and you fancy that, for just a moment, you feel

 time

 stop.

 And then you tell them, “Three. I can give you something that you’d never get otherwise.”

 You feel, rather than hear, their low swishings quiet as they listen, pretending like they don’t already know what you’re going to say.

 And you say it anyway.


	17. Like If You Cry Every Time

**DAVE**

You’ve never known what _actually_ being dead is like until now.

And even as the impression crosses your mind, you realize you’re _not_ dead. Because you can’t _experience_ being dead—all you can do is remember it, with a queer, dreamlike sort of de ja vu that makes trying to remember it vaguely bearable. You don’t know why a clear memory of being dead would be unbearable—you just know that it would be.

These are thoughts that pour into your head the millisecond after breath fills your lungs, like water splashing into a thimble that overflows with sudden, alien sensations of _life_. You’ve been dead before, but not _really_ dead—just after-life dead—and waking up from this shit is much different and more difficult.

When you open your eyes, there are two familiar faces staring down at you with concern; but neither is the face you want to see, despite the crushing relief etched on them.

“Where is she,” you choke out.

Rose and Jade exchange a look—a look that reminds you of the one they shared the day that you summoned Aradia.  But that’s not the look you want to see right now.

“Where _is_ she.”

Jade is the one to answer. “Aradia... she went back to the—the afterlife, I guess is the best word.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think?” asks Rose gravely. She knows you already know, of course; she always has.

“ _Shit_ ,” you swear and jerk into a sitting position—immediately regretting it. Your head had been cradled on Jade’s lap and now that it’s not you’ve got a splitting pain in it and a hole in your side in the process of knitting itself back together. “Why would she _do_ that?”

They both know you know, but Jade tells you softly, anyway. “Because you did a stupid thing, Dave. You died a heroic death.”

“Not only that,” says Rose quietly, “but she was not there to facilitate your resurrection.”

“So she went back.”

“Yes.”

“And... she saved my sorry ass.”

“Yes.”

“Well,” you tell them. You feel a sigh of relief creeping up—and a sickening feeling that it won’t last. “Let’s just summon her pretty red pajama’d self back up here.”

Rose and Jade exchange another one of those looks you are beginning to hate.

“Dave,” cautions Jade.

 _“What?”_ you snap. (It’s not fair for you to snap at them, you know, but you just can’t—)

“You are perfectly aware of the means that Aradia fell upon to return you to life.”

The relief shrivels away and packs its remains into a tight, dark little ball that settles into the pit of your stomach. “Tentaclebeast shit.”

“How else.” Rose’s deadpan is far from happy, or joking.

“Okay, and?”

“And we know better than most of the price people pay to get what they desire from the Noble Circle.”

Your heart clenches.

“Rose, stop talking in your fucking riddles.”

Your blonde twin sighs. “Dave,” she says again, “I don’t know what kind of bargain Aradia struck. But it was no small one. And there are few bargains the Circle will agree to if it doesn’t come out on top, and if it doesn’t get a soul or two out of it.”

 _You may as well kill me again, then,_ you think suddenly and abruptly.

And then, _shit. I thought we were past this, Strider._

And then, _but I’m not past her._

Time stops.

But without her, it feels like it won’t ever start again.


	18. More Perspective Changes

**HORROTERRORS**

Time matters little to beings such as you. You are made of the fabric of it, and space, and stardust and the ethers of existence and the dark things swirling within the Furthest Ring where you reside. There are few creatures who dare to listen to you, let alone to approach you.

At some point, one of you left the shelter of the Ring to raise a queen of her race. At another point, a little blonde girl listened to your words and let your tendrils seep into her and stain her skin dark. These points in time are not fixed, and they are at once past, present, and future, and they all blend together just a little bit.

There is one point that does not blur into the rest, and that is when a little gray girl in red ventures to the edge of your dually physical and ethereal realm and speaks into its depths to save a boy she loves, and you speak back to her, and you give her what she wants.

For a price.

Sometimes you are not even sure what you want. But there are rarely such delicacies offered to you as those of a creature’s time, and a creature’s soul. Especially when that creature happens to be a halfling, a being of both life and death, a being that crosses one realm and another; a being that can be physically closer to you and spiritually more nutritious than most others.

You remember this girl because she stays with you, for a time period that she marks with the ticking inside her brain. You cling to her ankles and suck life and love and darkness from the souls she escorts, and from the power that suffuses a godly being such as her. And she waits, patient.

And she comes to you now (and in the past, and in the future, for time doesn’t matter here in the Ring) and tells the lot of you that the time is up.

It is time for her to kick you off and rise to the surface of the world she yearns for, breaking all of the rules of the art of the ferrygirl.

You don’t want her to go.

So when she tries, you wrap your feelers around her ankles hard and tight and you don’t _let_ her go.

But then the blonde girl you remember and anticipate appears in a dream and takes your delicious psychopomp by the hand.

And then the blond boy your little snack loves is the only thing imprinted upon your consciousness and

time

stops.

Even for creatures who have no need of time.

And when it resumes, she is gone, and the blonde girl who used to know you hears your wails in her dreams for a hundred nights thereafter.


	19. Where Making This Happen

**DAVE**

You open your eyes to see _her_ face above you, and you think you are still asleep.

But it’s such a _lovely_ dream. Groggily, you reach up with calloused hands to cup her face and feel a sleepy smile on your face. You love these dreams, at least until they’re over.

“Good morning, starshine,” she says, in a familiar phrase you used to tell her in the mornings—

But she never speaks in dreams. All she does is kiss you, and hold you.

Which she promptly does. But _she doesn’t speak in your dreams._

Something is terribly wrong and you sit up suddenly, wondering if this is going to be another sweet-dream-turned-nightmare.

But Aradia is sitting on your bed, grinning her cherry-red grin, and Rose stands behind her looking sleepy and amused.

“This,” you say, “is not how my fantasies usually go.”

She kisses you on the forehead like she did the first time you _really_ met, still grinning.

“Reality is much better, I find,” Aradia says.

You stare at her.

_Reality?_

“Holy shit.”

She kisses you, long and thorough.

And just like that,

a year’s worth of stopped time

resumes.


	20. Obligatory Fluffy Epilogue

**YEARS IN THE FUTURE, BUT NOT MANY (ACTUALLY JUST 15)**

Your name is Eilian Strider, and as cool as this whole trip is, you think you kind of miss the real world.

The afterlife is amazing. There’s a multitude of dream bubbles; there’s the dark outline of the Furthest Ring; there’s the rivers of souls being herded into... well, she won’t tell you where, but there’s a lot of them going _somewhere_. It’s kind of surreal, to be honest.

Though you’ve known about this place and what your mother does here since you’ve been old enough to understand it (and keep it on the down-low), it’s the first time she’s taken you _with_ her. You’re kind of surprised you can even _be_ here, but you guess there are some perks to being the experimental firstborn of a psychopomp and a DJ, both of whom are technically gods.

(You’re still trying to figure out what kind of effect that whole bit has on you, but that can be handled in the future.)

“Eilian, look,” your mother says to you. You jerk back and your eyes follow where she’s pointing. It’s... a giant mirror that resembles black ice. In it, you see your mother—long and grinning, her hair an insane length, dressed in the red she always arrives and leaves in. You also see yourself, an interesting and generally very odd amalgamation of the traits of the two races composing you: small horns, dark hair, skin an interesting tone somewhere halfway between gray and peach, red eyes with troll-exclusive yellow sclera. Your mother’s hair and your father’s eyes, yadda yadda yadda.

That’s not the point here, though, as your mother soon makes clear. “Look deeper,” she bids you.

And you do.

And waving on the other side is your father, looking stubbly and groggy, waving tiredly.

“So this is how you do that?” you ask, and then feel dumb because obviously it is.

“I had to figure out some way to keep an eye on your father and you,” replies your mother with her trademark wink.

“Hey!” exclaims your pale human father indignantly.

Your mother just gives him a sultry grin.

You feel like puking and glare at her. “Hey, you two get a room,” you say.

Your father just arches and eyebrow above his shades. You huff.

“I’ll talk to you later, Dave,” says your mother. The man in question yawns and rolls over, back to sleep.

“How devoted,” you tell her.

“Just putting on a show for your benefit. Oh, look!” Her face lights up the way it always does; the way that tells you that as long as she still smiles like that, everything will be okay.

“What?”

“Over there. You can see the squiddleswarm coming.”

You follow her pointing finger and see—

A literal army of small stuffed cephalopods surging across deep space.

“What the fuck?”

Aradia grins at you.

“Mysteries!” she says brightly.

“You’ve been here this long and you haven’t figured out what’s up with that?” you ask incredulously.

She leans in, fluttering her fairy wings, and pecks you on the forehead. Then she pokes you on the cheek and says, “I could have. But I was waiting for you.”

And then she shoots off after the squiddleswarm in a trail of fairy dust, the faint whispers of tentaclemonster tendrils billowing around her ankles.

You stare after her incredulously for a moment.

And then your father’s voice sounds from behind you, chuckling.

“Go on, kid. Let your old lady show you how she rolls.”

So you do.


End file.
